Wizards of the Coast has announced during PAX East that they are working with Curse to create a digital toolset that can be used with any digital device to manage your D&D 5th edition game:

GO BEYOND PEN & PAPER!

We are excited to announce development of D&D Beyond, an official digital toolset for use with the Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition rules. We have partnered with Curse to take D&D players beyond pen and paper, providing a rules compendium, character builder, digital character sheets, and more—all populated with official D&D content. D&D Beyond aims to make game management easier for both players and Dungeon Masters by providing high-quality tools available on any device, empowering beginners and veterans alike!

“D&D Beyond speaks to the way gamers are able to blend digital tools with the fun of storytelling around the table with your friends,” said Nathan Stewart, Senior Director of Dungeons & Dragons. “These tools represent a way forward for D&D, and we’re excited to get them into the hands of players soon!”

Visit dndbeyond.com to sign up for the beta now. Further details about the beta and launch are coming soon!

This comes to us as a large surprise, and they are now taking Beta Signups at DnDBeyond.com so that everyone will be able to look at what will be upcoming in the near future. We have some clarifications on the news from Adam Bradford of Curse from some online conversations that took place over the past few days on Reddit:

At launch, players will be able to access SRD content and build and view a small number of characters with a free D&D Beyond account.

We don’t have exact pricing nailed down, but you will also be able to buy official digital D&D content for all fifth edition products with flexible purchase options. You can pay only for the D&D content you need. If you only play fighters, for example, you’ll be able to just pick up the stuff you need to track swinging that giant two-handed sword.

A small monthly subscription will be needed to manage more than a handful of characters and to enable more advanced features, like homebrew content integration. At this time, we don’t know exactly how much the subscription will cost, but please continue to check dndbeyond.com for the most up-to-date announcements and information!

I’m Adam Bradford, DDB product lead for Curse. I’m flying back from PAX today, but I’ll give a brief reply between flights.

A few things that I can hopefully clarify here:

D&D Beyond is a responsive web application that can work on any device – definitely not a desktop client or mobile app only available for iOS or Android. We care a great deal about offline capability, and you’ll be able to access your characters, etc. just fine on the terrible WIFI at those conventions. 🙂

The DDB toolset is being developed by Curse Media and is not a directly tied to the former Curse App that was recently shared has become the Twitch App.

At launch, players will be able to access SRD content and build and view a small number of characters with a free D&D Beyond account. We don’t have exact pricing nailed down, but you will also be able to buy official digital D&D content for all fifth edition products with flexible purchase options. You can pay only for the D&D content you need. If you only play fighters, for example, you’ll be able to just pick up the stuff you need to track swinging that giant two-handed sword. This is NOT a microtransaction model – we aren’t forcing anyone to buy the content in small chunks – it can still be bought all at once. It’s all just flexibility.

A small monthly subscription will be needed to manage more than a handful of characters and to enable more advanced features, like homebrew content integration. At this time, we don’t know exactly how much the subscription will cost, but please continue to check dndbeyond.com for the most up-to-date announcements and information!

I can’t share much else yet, but we’re terribly excited to get this into players’ hands for the beta very, very soon. Thanks!

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I’ve signed up for the beta testing and I’m waiting eagerly to commence.

The reason is that I already use my laptop in our sessions in order to run encounters. Until now, I use the kobold club encounter generator, the Improved-Initiative.com encounter generator, GoogleSheets (where I keep notes) plus CampaignLogger. I’d love to have one tool to merge some of these tools and D&D Beyond seems like it.

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